Bernard Peng

CS190 

ˇ@ˇ@After reading chapter 3 of the Mythical Man Month, I think it raises some
very interesting issues in its description of the ˇ§surgery teamˇ¨ model of
developing computer software as compared to the traditional team approach.
Although the ˇ§surgeryˇ¨ model may work well in the real world for medium sized
projects, I do not think it is something that we can fully utilize for the
cs190 projects.  The best organization for the final teams will be a
combination of the ˇ§surgeryˇ¨ model with the traditional team model.  

ˇ@ˇ@The strength of the ˇ§surgeryˇ¨ model lies within the surgeon; he is
expected to be the one who does the actual programming work for the project.
The rest of the team acts in various roles to supplement the surgeons work such
as building tools or documenting the work.  However, our class is composed of
students who all have roughly the same amount of programming experience (during
their 3-4 years in college).  Most likely, none of us qualifies as someone who
can be the ˇ§surgeonˇ¨ of a team, which requires 10 years of experience.  

ˇ@ˇ@The traditional approach will also be problematic to use because we will
have to manage a group of 10 people for a project that must be completed in the
span of a month.  There will be a very complicated communication pattern since
everybody will have to communicate with every other team member.  This may lead
to many more meetings than is necessary to complete this project.  

ˇ@ˇ@In order to avoid the weaknesses of these two models, a combination of them
may work best.  Rather than having a single ˇ§surgeonˇ¨ or 10 people do the
main programming, we could use a core group of 3 or 4 people who do all the
main programming.  The remaining members could take up the other positions
described in the Mythical Man Month.  This approach would let us get around the
requirement of having a central ˇ§surgeonˇ¨ with 10 years experience and fit
that modelˇ¦s strengths to a college level project.